Just Above My Head Page 28

  He knew now, dimly, that he did not really want to know; at the same moment, he realized that he had no choice—he asked: “What did you do?”

  “I want to ask you something first, Arthur”—and Crunch sat up, speaking to the back of Arthur’s head—”what you going to do when I go away from here?”

  “I don’t know, Crunch. I don’t want to think about it.”

  “You’ve got to think about it!”

  He reached down and turned Arthur’s face to his, and his hands were suddenly wet with Arthur’s tears. Arthur had not made a sound and his body was not shaking. He turned his face away and leaned the back of his head against Crunch’s knee.

  “I don’t know, Crunch. I’ll keep on going to school, naturally, and I’ll keep on working with my music—and—I’ll wait till you come back.”

  And suppose I don’t come back? Crunch wanted to say. But he said, “Arthur, what about—?” The uptown train stopped at the station, seemed nearly, in fact, to have entered the room.

  “What about what?”

  “Other people.”

  “What other people?”

  “Arthur—have you ever had a girl? No. I guess you haven’t.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “It would be good for you—to have a girl.”

  “Well—I’m sure I will, Crunch—one of these days.”

  He wiped his face with the back of his hand and turned to look at Crunch.

  “Why you talking about that now?”

  Crunch looked uneasy, and the uptown train rushed past their window, causing the entire building to shake.

  “Maybe I just hope you make love to a girl while I’m gone instead of—”

  “A man? Another man?” Arthur looked down at the floor. “I haven’t thought about it, Crunch. I haven’t thought about it at all. I just love you.”

  “Well, you can’t love me forever, man, you got to grow up, for Christ’s sake!” And Crunch rose from the bed and strode to the window, looking out. Arthur watched his back.

  ‘That what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Yes. No. No.”

  “Why can’t I love you forever? I will anyway.”

  “Arthur, you just a baby, and sometimes, I swear—!”

  “You sorry? You sorry about us?”

  “No. No, Arthur, don’t take it that way. I just—I just want you to be all right. I want you to be happy. I don’t”—he faltered, the streets seemed strangely silent—”I don’t want you to be sorry.”

  “Sorry about us? I’ll never be sorry about us, I swear, no matter what happens.”

  “I made love to Julia this afternoon.”

  Crunch sat down, abruptly, on the bed, as though someone had pushed him, and stared at Arthur. His face held fear and pain.

  Arthur looked down at the floor again. He asked, “And were you going to bring her here tonight?” Then, looking up, “That why you been so quiet?”

  “No. I didn’t want to bring her here tonight.”

  “You can go get her, you know. I don’t want you to do nothing you don’t want to do, not because of me, man—you want me to find a girl now, because you found a girl!”

  “Arthur, Julia ain’t nothing but a child—”

  “Then how come you to make love to her? Of course, I guess you think I ain’t nothing but a child!”

  “Arthur? will you listen to me? Please? Please?”

  Arthur stood up and walked back to the window, his hands in his pockets. Crunch could not see his face.

  “Arthur?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Come over here.”

  Arthur did not move.

  “Come over here!”

  Arthur moved, and Crunch grabbed him, pulling him down on the bed. Crunch moved so that he was leaning against the headrest, with Arthur in his arms, the back of Arthur’s head against Crunch’s chest.

  “Arthur, please try to listen, and don’t get mad at me, and don’t jump all evil and proud. I know I can bring a girl down here if I want to, and you can, too, if you want to, and I wasn’t saying you should get a girl because I got a girl. I don’t have a girl.” He paused, and swallowed. He said, “I just have you.”

  It was impossible to tell, from Arthur’s stillness, what was going on in his mind: and Crunch was afraid to turn him so that he could see his face.

  “You a beautiful kid, Arthur, you don’t know it, and a whole lot of slimy motherfuckers and some of them might look just like me going to be trying to fuck with your ass and you can’t blame me if I get worried about it.”

  “What’s that got to do with Julia—and this afternoon?”

  “Arthur—people get in trouble and they need help—and, sometimes—you can’t say no.”

  But, Crunch thought, at least, he’s listening: and he held Arthur a little tighter. Still, he did not know what to say—exactly—he did not know how to say it. He remembered Julia’s face, and body, her overwhelming need. He said, “Sometimes a person just needs somebody’s arms around them, then anything can happen—one thing leads to another—do you understand me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you know I wouldn’t hurt you, man, for anything in the world?”

  Arthur was silent.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. But—I don’t understand—”

  “Look, I can’t tell you everything. It ain’t for me to tell you. But Julia’s in trouble. She’s got to get away from her daddy.” He paused. “That’s why I was glad your mama asked her to stay at your house.”

  “Crunch—was you fixing to bring her here—if—?”

  “No. At least not tonight. I had to talk to you first. I wasn’t looking to get my brains beat out.” He lit a cigarette. “Arthur?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You listening?”

  “Sure.”

  “I want you to do something for me—do me a favor. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to look out for Julia. Be her friend. Forget about this afternoon. That’s just something that happened. That’s life. You’ll understand it—better—by and by,” and Crunch smiled.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just be her friend. She’s got to get away from her daddy.”

  Arthur moved, and looked up into Crunch’s face.

  “It’s that bad?”

  “It’s worse than that.”

  “What does Julia want to do?”

  “She told you tonight. She wants to take care of her little brother.”

  “But she can’t—she’s not old enough!”

  Crunch put out his cigarette. His face was bleak as he looked down, and said, “Who knows? She’s seen enough already to make her more than old enough.”

  Arthur was silent. Then, very shyly, “Crunch, do you love Julia? If you do, it’s all right. I won’t be jealous—”

  Crunch grinned. “I bet. That why you was acting so funny a few minutes ago?”

  “Oh, I was just surprised—”

  “If that’s the way you act when you surprised, I damn sure ain’t going to be giving you no surprise birthday parties!”

  “Oh, come on, Crunch—”

  “I been thinking about it all day—here we are: she’s fourteen. You sixteen. I’m almost twenty. I felt like a old man, a wicked old man. But I don’t know what else I could have done, except disappear or die. That girl was crying out, Arthur. Crying.” He shook his shoulders, remembering the sullen day. He looked down at Arthur. “She don’t mean to me what you mean to me, and I hope you got that straight in your head now, but she’s in trouble and I don’t want nothing to happen to her. Be her friend. If she knows she’s got you, and your family—that might make a whole lot of difference.”

  He watched Arthur, realizing that there was peace between them again; and he’d told the truth, without betraying Julia. He leaned back on the bed, pulling Arthur closer.

  “But I don’t think I want her to be my girl fri
end,” Arthur said.

  Crunch laughed. “One thing at a time, son. One thing at a time.”

  One week later, Crunch was gone—just like that, a great hole opened, and he dropped through it, out of sight.

  The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grown-ups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall—they fell unnoticed—seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.

  But, before this time, another year! Crunch might be dead, Crunch might be back: so, this song rang and rang in Arthur’s skull as he went about doing whatever he was doing, and he never quite knew what he was doing, though he, somehow, got it done. He walked the tumultuous, resounding streets, streets which were incredibly silent and empty for him—listening for Crunch’s footfall beside him, seeing Crunch in the distance, and hurrying to catch up with him, though he knew it was not Crunch, seeing Crunch come toward him—going to school, rehearsing, for a time, with some people he didn’t like (he was never, in fact, to sing in a quartet again), working, part-time, as a Western Union messenger, singing, in churches, on the weekends.

  Faith I am maintaining

  I go on, uncomplaining,

  But, before this time, another year.

  My life may all forsake me,

  And death may overtake me,

  If I’m with Thee,

  I’ve no need to fear.

  He sensed that Paul and Florence were worried about him. He faced the fact that, for the first time in his life, he had something to hide—he had dreams of Crunch being court-martialed and tortured because he, Arthur, had “talked”: and so he mastered a candid surface, stayed in his room only to study, or write letters—with the door open —and, otherwise, remained visible at the piano, his most private place. His second most private place was the movies, but he was never able to remember a single movie he had seen as that summer ended and fall, then winter came.

  Make my pathway brighter,

  Make my burden lighter,

  Help me to do good whenever I can.

  Let Thy presence thrill me,

  Thy Holy Spirit fill me,

  And hold me in the hollow

  Of Thy hand.

  “That song sure seems to mean a lot to you,” Paul said mildly, one Saturday evening. He had been listening to Arthur play for several minutes. Arthur had not realized that his father was in the room.

  “Oh—hello, Daddy.” He let his fingers drop from the keyboard. “I have to sing it tomorrow night, in Brooklyn.”

  “You accompany yourself when you sing?”

  “Sometimes. Not all the time. Most of the time I follow the church pianist.”

  “Can they follow you?” Paul asked and laughed, and, after a moment, Arthur laughed.

  “Sometimes.” He looked at his father. “It don’t seem to me like I’m that hard to follow—and most of them, really, they play better piano than me.”

  “Well,” Paul said, “you don’t really hear yourself. But that’s all right—for right now, anyway, that’s all right.”

  They were alone in the house. Florence was out—shopping, or having a drink with Martha.

  “You hear from any of the old gang?”

  Arthur had a letter from Crunch in his pocket, but it took him a moment to say—trying to look as though it had slipped his mind: “Oh. Yeah, I got a letter from Crunch.”

  “How is he?”

  “He sounds fine. He sends his love.”

  “He’s a fine boy,” Paul said, and lit his pipe. He walked to the window. “I reckon you sure miss him, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Arthur glumly, speaking to himself. Then, “I mean, yes sir, I sure do. We—all—had some nice times together.”

  “How’s his family?”

  “I believe they’re all right, sir.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul. “You latched onto him like he was Hall—like he was your big brother.”

  Arthur felt immediately disloyal. “Why no, sir,” he said. “Not exactly.” Paul looked at him, and Arthur blushed. “Hall’s my brother,” Arthur said lamely. “Crunch—Crunch—he’s my friend.”

  “Just the same, he’s older than you, and you always been the younger brother and so you needed another older brother. Somebody you could trust,” and Paul looked at Arthur again. “Ain’t nothing wrong with it—the youngest always needs the oldest. Until,” he added, after a devastating pause during which he lit his pipe again, “the youngest grows up enough to realize he’s his own man and can’t keep running to his older brother no more.” He paused again, and looked at Arthur. “Especially if he’s not really the older brother but just the older friend.”

  “But can’t a friend,” Arthur dared, “be as important as a brother?”

  “He can be more important. I’m just saying they’re not the same.”

  He sat down in the chair near the window.

  “When you get married, for example”—here he paused for another examination of his pipe—“if you do, and I hope you do, that woman you marry, she going to have be more important than your mama or your daddy. You ain’t going to be living with us. You going to be living with her, and raising your children with her. We can’t hold on to you—we leaving. We did what we could. And you can’t hold on to us—can’t nobody move backward, not far, anyhow. They come to grief.” He smiled, but something in the smile frightened Arthur. “And I don’t want you to come to grief.”

  Arthur sensed a warning: he did not want to hear it. To hear it would be to confess. Something in him longed to break his silence, to ask What’s happening to me? He longed to lay his burden down, and end his tormented wonder. But he could not incriminate, menace Crunch—his “heart”: he sat silent, looking down at the keyboard. “What you thinking about, son?”

  “I was thinking about what you said. But,” he looked up and smiled, “I don’t know what to say about it.”

  “Well, keep on thinking about it, then. Ain’t no harm.”

  Hide me in Thy bosom

  Till the storm of life is o’er.

  Rock me in the cradle of Thy love!

  Feed me, Jesus,

  Till I want no more,

  And take me to Thy blessed

  Home above!

  He was singing for Crunch—to keep Crunch safe, and to bring Crunch back, and he was singing for me, to keep me safe and to bring me back: he was singing to hold up the world. There entered his voice then, therefore, a mightily moving, lonely sweetness and the people were transfigured and transfixed: he sang to their love and their worry; he sang to their hope. With his song, and standing before the people, he made his confession at the throne of mercy and knew himself, then, as his voice issued from him, to be redeemed, in the hands of a power greater than any on the earth. His love was his confession, his testimony was his song.

  So he gritted through the grinding days and nights, the ferocity of his dreams, his leaping body’s ache, the sorrow, like a carpet, at the bottom of his soul. He had no friends anymore, and was unable to imagine himself with friends. Everyone he saw, he saw from very far away, as at the wrong end of a telescope. Their words—sounds—simply spun in the air, utterly meaningless; their words never reached him. He liked his job as messenger because it left him alone for hours in the streets, and demanded nothing more of him than physical energy.

  When his job ended, he went to the movies and sat in the
dark, letting images and sounds roll over him. He relived, over and over, every instant of his time with Crunch—every song, every gesture, every embrace—until he felt that he was going crazy, began, really, to be afraid that, in another moment, he would begin to howl and be carried off to Bellevue. Sometimes he almost wished that this would happen. But, no—neither Crunch nor I wished to find him in Bellevue. We were suffering, too, after all, and we had a right to expect him to keep the faith. And at such moments, too, he felt that if he were to fail his lover, or his brother, he would then, somehow, have cut the cord binding us to life: if he faltered for an instant, someone, somewhere, on the other side of the world, in that very same instant, would know that love had failed and thus, be enabled to bring us down. At such moments, he shuddered—it is not easy to bear so cosmic a weight—and went back to watching the movie for a while, or rose and walked out into the streets or went home, to the piano.

  But sometimes, he simply sat in the movies and let the tears roll down his face, and saw nothing.

  And it was hard for him at home, though he did not like to admit this. He wanted, really, to leave home, although he knew that, for the moment, this was neither possible nor just. It was as though, at home, he found himself trapped in a play, acting a role he had played too long.

  Paul and Florence were worried about him, of course they were. They could not help this, and they could not hide it, and the devices they used to dissemble their concern set his teeth on edge. Their worry was not nearly as specific as Arthur imagined—they were not alarmists. They were not concerned about his attachment to Crunch, which they took as inevitable. Only time could indicate to what extent it was “normal,” but normal is a word which has very little utility in a crisis. He had, as far as they could see, no other friends—Peanut was gone, Red was soon to go—but there was nothing they could usefully say, or do, about that; especially since a certain standoffishness was a family trait. Arthur was no worse than I had been at his age, and no worse, certainly, than his father. Yet, they were concerned about the nature, the meaning, of his privacy. They did not want to violate it: at the same time, they wanted him to know that they—and life, and love, and the world—were his. They could not break in; he could not break out. They wished that I were home—naturally, for many reasons—though they also wondered what I would be like when I got there. They also realized, though Arthur didn’t, that, as he was outgrowing everything and everybody, he would also have outgrown his relationship to me: we would have to find a way of finding each other again.